Devyn Ormsby’s fruit sculptures look good enough to eat. Paying homage to the blown glass fruit makers and collectors from the 1960’s, Ormsby makes the kind of decorative pieces you might remember from your early childhood, but with a trendy, sophisticated twist.
In an interview with MOLD, Ormsby explained that fake fruit was “usually made from various materials [like] plastic, Lucite, glass or wood” and was typically “light, simplistic and exaggerated in form.” Her collection, however, takes the traditional form but adds to it the weight of crystal glass, colored in pink, blue, yellow, and lime.
Amongst her glass fruit, you can find a banana, pear, mandarin, and lemon. The process begins “by making a silicone mold of the original object, from which [she] can make wax replicas. The next step is to fettle (trim and clean) the wax, filling holes and removing any seams… Once that is done, [she] begins building a contour mold around the wax. This is made up of many layers of a plastic/silica mix built around the shape of the fruit.”
Since graduating from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2015, Ormsby has worked in a Glass Studio based in Auckland, New Zealand. Her latest glass fruit series, named “Devon Made”, had already caught the world’s attention and rightfully so.
